The trial of the former SS guard Oskar Gröning has been told how Zyklon B pesticide, which was used to murder most of the victims of Nazi gas chambers, could sometimes take an hour to kill.
An expert said that the swiftness of death for inmates in the gas chambers depended on the concentration used and that it sometimes caused men, women and children a particularly agonising and lengthy death.
Mr Gröning, 93, is on trial in the city of Lüneburg for his role in the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. He told the court he was “morally guilty” but denies legal responsibility because he did not personally take part in the killings.
On Tuesday Sven Anders, a